For many of us it would be practically impossible to count all of the times we’ve had to provide credit card details to online retailers. There are millions of ‘digital footprints’ of financial records across the internet, making it an arduous – likely impossible – task to find out which retailers have kept these details on file, whether that card is still in use or whether they are sitting on long-expired card details.

Imagine a future – that’s nearer than you think – where you open your mobile banking app, and in addition to all the services you already know and use, you can find a list of all the web sites where you enrolled your card(s). Imagine that for each of those retailers, you could suspend or de-activate your card or set individual monthly spending limits for each of them.

Sounds wonderful to have? The good news is that your bank, thanks to Gemalto, as a certified VTS/MDES partner for EMV tokenization, is about to bring it to you.

This is a digital payment revolution. It started five years ago with the emergence of digital wallets. EMV Tokenization is the technology behind the scenes that lets you enroll your EMV cards into wallets for mobile payment, in-app payments or in-web payments, for smartphones and wearables. This is already a massive success in the world but still has huge growth potential. Now that these digital cards have expanded to eCommerce, EMV tokens are set to replace real card data on the merchant site used at checkout.

By replacing your card with a token for your online payments, your Bank will manage the token’s life cycle. The VISA and MasterCard tokenization platform is essentially the engine room that helps to deploy these new services and drive this powerful functionality. We are helping banks to deploy this innovative customer journey through the use of its Cloud Based Developer Portal, allowing suppliers to stay up to speed with EMV token life cycle management features, by providing sample codes, testing and tracking its deployments.

On top of this up-to-date list of retailers, EMV Tokens also take care of card expiration dates automatically so you’ll never worry again about keeping your subscription accounts up to date.

Tokens also protect you from rejected payments caused by false-positive declined transactions. This can occur even if you enter your card data correctly, simply because the merchant risk management software evaluates you, you card or the transaction as risky and denies it, leading to user frustration. This is more common than you’d expect with one out of every four generation Y customers affected at least once in the last 12 months.

False-positives can hurt retailers beyond the initial lost sale. According to The Paypers it also damages the merchant’s reputation and ultimately the customer relationship.

This technology is helping to enable new services and convenience, as well as new services. Stay tuned, your bank is about to put you back in control of your online transactions, with a little help from Gemalto.